LifeLine CEO: Beckel 'should be ashamed'

2/20/13 1:55 PM EST

Fox News co-host Bob Beckel is catching heat for suggesting that rape is not a problem on college campuses.

To the shock of his co-hosts on "The Five," Beckel asked, rhetorically, "When was the last time you heard about a rape on campus?" When told that it's rampant," Beckel expressed disbelief, though he acknowledged that date-rape did occur.

According to New York University's latest statistics on sexual violence on college campuses, one out of every five women are raped during their college years, and approximately one-third of them are first-year students between the ages of 17 and 19. Eighty-one percent of on-campus sexual assaults are not reported to the police. (*My colleague Josh Gerstein notes these figures are disputed.)

Peter Cahill, the CEO of LifeLine Response and LifeLine Edu, a personal safety smartphone app designed to end such assaults on college campuses, called Beckel's remarks "insulting to the thousands of survivors of sexual assault on college campuses and across the country."

"Every year, thousands of college students are sexually assaulted and these kinds of ill-informed statements only set us back on the work we are doing to end assaults on college campuses," Cahill told POLITICO in a statement. "He should be ashamed of what he said and apologize immediately, then spend time on a college campus educating himself on the vulgar reality of the fact that 1 in 4 women on a college campus are in fact victims of a sexual assault. Sexual assaults are reaching epidemic levels and it demands the facts to be accurate and precise."